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167 The Executioner At War: Soldiers, Spies and Traitors lbert Pierrepoint was not called up when war broke out. But there were war-related changes for him as well. Not only murderers and murderesses could now be punished by death, there were sentences under the Treason Act and Treachery Act as well, both imposing »death« as the maximum penalty. The Treason Act went back to an ancient law of King Edward III's time (1351). »Treason« was, first of all, any attack on the legitimate ruler, for instance by planning to murder him, or on the legitimacy of the succession to the throne: It was treason as well if someone tried to smuggle his genes into the royal family by adultery with the queen, the oldest daughter of the king or the crown prince’s wife. This aspect of the law became surprisingly topical in our days: When it became known that Princess Diana while married to the Prince of Wales had had an affair with her riding instructor James Hewitt, there were quite some law experts who declared this to be a case of treason – following the letter of the Act, it doubtlessly was. However as it would have been difficult to find the two witnesses prescribed by the Act, a prosecution was never started. Just Hewitt’s brother officers of the Household Cavalry did something: They »entered his name on the gate« which was equivalent to drumming him out of the regiment and declaring the barracks off limits for him. 317 During World War II, it became important that a person committed treason if they supported the king’s enemies in times of war. However: Treason of this kind could be committed only by those who owed »allegiance«, i.e. by those who were subjects of the crown or, at least, were living permanently in the country. Now what about foreigners who sneaked into the country as spies or saboteurs, or came by parachute? They could not be tried under the Treason Act but only under the Official Secrets Act or under the Emergency A

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  • 167

    The Executioner At War: Soldiers, Spies and Traitors

    lbert Pierrepoint was not called up when war broke out. But there were

    war-related changes for him as well. Not only murderers and

    murderesses could now be punished by death, there were sentences

    under the Treason Act and Treachery Act as well, both imposing »death« as

    the maximum penalty.

    The Treason Act went back to an ancient law of King Edward III's time

    (1351). »Treason« was, first of all, any attack on the legitimate ruler, for

    instance by planning to murder him, or on the legitimacy of the succession

    to the throne: It was treason as well if someone tried to smuggle his genes

    into the royal family by adultery with the queen, the oldest daughter of the

    king or the crown prince’s wife. This aspect of the law became surprisingly

    topical in our days: When it became known that Princess Diana while married

    to the Prince of Wales had had an affair with her riding instructor James

    Hewitt, there were quite some law experts who declared this to be a case of

    treason – following the letter of the Act, it doubtlessly was. However as it

    would have been difficult to find the two witnesses prescribed by the Act, a

    prosecution was never started. Just Hewitt’s brother officers of the Household

    Cavalry did something: They »entered his name on the gate« which was

    equivalent to drumming him out of the regiment and declaring the barracks

    off limits for him.317

    During World War II, it became important that a person committed treason

    if they supported the king’s enemies in times of war. However: Treason of

    this kind could be committed only by those who owed »allegiance«, i.e. by

    those who were subjects of the crown or, at least, were living permanently

    in the country. Now what about foreigners who sneaked into the country as

    spies or saboteurs, or came by parachute? They could not be tried under the

    Treason Act but only under the Official Secrets Act or under the Emergency

    A

  • 168

    Powers [Defence] Act 1939. These laws, however, only imposed prison terms.

    From the prosecution point of view it was awkward as well that the Treason

    Act demanded two witnesses at least in order to convict. The legal advisers

    of the War Cabinet agreed that this was insufficient, that an act should be

    drawn up carrying the obligatory death penalty for spies — just as was the

    case with murder —318 and which, with regard to the proof required, was less

    demanding than the Treason Act.

    Consequently in May 1940 the Treachery Act was hurried through

    Parliament. James Hayward319 hints at the British counter-espionage (MI5)

    not being much interested in seeing spies and saboteurs hanged – a dead

    spy had no value at all. It was the politicians, first and foremost Winston

    Churchill and Lord Swinton, head of the Security Executive, who wanted to

    have spies executed, and accompanied by as much propaganda noise as

    possible.320 Concerned M.P.'s were told during the reading that the Treachery

    Act was aiming at grave cases only; lighter ones could still be tried under the

    Defence Regulations. There was one hitch, however: It is basically for the

    court to decide whether certain acts (if proved) are to be regarded as »grave«

    or not. But this decision was now suddenly transferred to the prosecutor

    because it was his decision under which law he proceeded. During the

    debate, speakers for the government pointed out that prosecution could be

    made under the Treachery Act and the Defence Regulations, thus again

    leaving the decision on the weight of the guilt in the hands of the court. And

    this the prosecutor would certainly do. (He didn't — not always, that is.)

    A further problem was that the Treachery Act spoke of »intent« as being a

    requisite element of the offence:

    If, with intent to help the enemy, any person does, or attempts or conspires with any

    other person to do any act which is designed or likely to give assistance to the naval,

    military or air operations of the enemy, to impede such operations of His Majesty’s

    forces, or to endanger life, he shall be guilty of felony and shall on conviction suffer

    death.321

    Intent, however, is a subjective element of the offence and therefore hard

    to prove – like anything that happens inside a criminal's head. During the

    second reading of the Treachery Act, left-wing Labour M.P. Sydney Silverman

    demurred that the prosecution might be tempted not to prove intent but to

    merely infer intention, following the legal rule that every man is presumed

    to intend reasonable consequences of his intentional acts. So if I commit an

  • 169

    intentional act which has as its reasonable consequence something

    favourable to the enemy, according to this doctrine I »intended« this

    consequence as well, i.e. intended to help the enemy. Criminal intent would

    thus — albeit indirectly — be proved. The chief legal adviser of the

    government however, the Attorney General, rejected this fear in a grand

    gesture:

    I really do not think there could be any such danger. The words are quite plain. We are

    dealing with a case of a most serious character—a capital charge—where the burden

    on the prosecution has to be fulfilled to the last scintilla, if one may use that

    expression, and although, of course, the circumstances may build up evidence from

    which a jury may draw an intent—after all, the last arbiters are the jury— I cannot

    imagine any possible subject matter in which 12 fair-minded Englishmen or

    Englishwomen would be more completely satisfied that criminal intent had to be

    proved than in a case of this kind.322

    But precisely this unimaginable happened to the Abwehr agent Josef

    Jakobs323. Nothing more could be proved against him than his landing by

    parachute; he had broken his leg on the landing, and had himself attracted

    notice by firing pistol shots into the air; he denied any intention to fulfil his

    mission but had agent's equipment with him.

    At this time, MI5 controlled all German spies who had been sneaked into

    the country, without exception. Some of the men were just kept prisoner and

    were interrogated as informants again and again – the MI5 people spoke of

    their »living library«, which they »consulted« every now and then –, some

    were turned and used as double agents. For this latter purpose, however, only

    those men were eligible who were not known to a large number of civilians

    as being taken prisoner and who had not yet used their wireless. But: »He (=

    Jakobs) was manifestly unemployable as a double agent«, said Colonel Robin

    Stephens, chief of »Camp 020« in Latchmere House, London, the

    interrogation centre for captured spies, »and blank as a tome of reference in

    the living counter-espionage library at 020. There was no good reason why

    he should continue to live.«324

    This – and not the weight of his guilt – cost Jakobs his life; he was handed

    over to the politicians as free game. He was prosecuted under the Treachery

    Act – and not under the Defence Regulations –, was accused of attempted

    espionage, was tried – as a soldier – by a military court which meant there

    was no jury, was found guilty and shot at the London Tower on 15 August

  • 170

    1941. His was the last execution to be performed there, ever. The other 16

    men who were accused and sentenced under the Treachery Act were hanged.

    One oft them was Karel

    Richard Richter.325 Some

    MI5 agents were not happy

    at all about his execution

    and its subsequent

    publication. It seemed

    certain to them that

    Richter, among other

    things, had been given the

    task to find out whether

    another German spy – Wulf

    Schmidt aka TATE (English

    code name) aka LEONHARDT

    (German code name) – was at large or was working as a double agent in

    British hands. They were afraid that the German Abwehr might consider this

    spy as exposed if they learnt that Richter’s cover was blown. That would be

    the end of a promising double cross game for which the British used Wulf

    Schmidt. However the sceptics did not prevail with these arguments, and

    Richter was hanged.

    The 29-year-old agent started a memorable and unique fight when Albert

    Pierrepoint and assistant Stephen Wade entered his cell. First he ran his head

    with full force against the cell wall, possibly to stun himself. But he remained

    conscious, and resisted with might and main. He even succeeded to tear the

    pin of the buckle on his arm strap from the hole so that he was free again.

    Four prison warders, two executioners, and 17 minutes (!)326 were required to

    subdue the prisoner who stood 5 foot 11.5 inch high and weighed 172

    pounds, to pinion him anew and frogmarch him onto the trap doors.

    There are different versions of what happened next. The better known is

    the one which Pierrepoint gives in his memoirs (he calls the prisoner »Otto

    Schmidt«)327 and which is confirmed by Stephen Wade's diary.328 At the very

    moment when Pierrepoint opened the trap doors, Richter jumped high, the

    rubber ring at the noose slipped, and the noose opened a bit. It did not slide

    over the head but was caught at the upper lip under the nose. In this position,

    the noose could not draw tight fully and could not occlude blood vessels and

    Karel Richard Richter

    Mug shots taken from his MI5 file.

  • 171

    airways. Pierrepoint asserts that »Schmidt« died of a broken neck, and the

    LPC4 entry confirms it: »Fracture dislocation between 3rd and 4th vertebrae

    with crushing of the cord.«

    The other version is in Robert Jackson's biography of the London coroner

    Sir William Bentley Purchase.329 There, a verbatim quote reports what

    allegedly a prison warder told Purchase after he had held the customary

    inquest following Richter's execution at Wandsworth:

    …when we went into his cell to take him to the shed he announced that he didn't

    propose to be hanged by a lot of British bastards. We had to take him, but he put up a

    terrific fight, knocking us all over the place. But the British bastards hanged him all

    right, even though we had to strap him on a board to do it.

    Such a board did indeed exist. At Wandsworth prison, it was kept together

    with other execution paraphernalia in a built-in cupboard below the stairs

    leading from the gallows chamber to the pit.330 If Fielding is right, it was used

    in the execution of the spy Carl Heinrich Meier.331

    An aspect in disfavour of Jackson's narrative is the fact that a man strapped

    on a board hardly could have jumped in the manner described by Pierrepoint.

    Another: that here a journalist (Jackson) quotes the words of an informant

    who is notorious for his penchant for drasticness and exaggeration (Purchase)

    who renders an alleged dialogue with a prison warder of whom we do not

    even know whether he claims to have been present or whether he just tells

    prison talk. Albert Pierrepoint, who mentions the board in question in his

    memoirs as well, denies however to ever having used it.332 All in all: It is

    possible that at some time a spy was strapped on this board – just that it

    wasn't Richter.

    I give another story told by Purchase and Jackson which illustrates perhaps

    even better their quality, and at the same time justifies my scepticism.

    Purchase, at that time still Deputy Coroner, and barrister in his principal

    occupation, meets a colleague in his club and calls him to his side:

    »Remember So-and-So, that fellow convicted of knifing the girl?« he asked. Bolton

    nodded.

    »I held an inquest on him this morning, and what do you think? His neck was

    stretched to this length.« Purchase held his hands apart to indicate a distance of more

    than a yard.

    »Mr Purchase,« the shocked Bolton protested. »I am just having my tea.«

  • 172

    »But it's true,« insisted Purchase, ignoring Bolton‘s shock. »Yes,« he said, adjusting his

    hands to give a little more distance, »at least this length!«333

    In the many LPC4 forms which I have seen, the difference between the drop

    length as decided upon before the hanging, and the drop length as measured

    one hour after the execution is round about two inches as a rule, sometimes

    up to four inches. There are about a dozen examples for more than that, but

    all of them are far away from a yard.

    I know just two cases, documented on an LPC4 form, with a difference of

    more than ten inches: 4 April 1894 in Birmingham: 16 inches (Frederick

    William Fenton), and on 7 July 1896 in Reading: 11 inches (Charles Thomas

    Wooldridge, i.e. the »C.T.W.«, to whom Oscar Wilde's »Ballad of Reading

    Gaol« is dedicated). These two cases already seem so monstrous that one

    would prefer to believe in an error of measurement – let alone Purchase's

    »yard«.

    For such an excessive elongation of the neck to happen, such as Purchase

    wants to make believe in his anecdote, all neck organs including muscles and

    sinews needed to be torn, with the exception of the skin which is, admittedly,

    very flexible. Until I find documentary proof to the contrary, I consider this

    a myth.

    Three more spies were hanged at Pentonville by Stanley Cross who had

    been trained together with Albert Pierrepoint. Unfortunately, he seems to

    have had a poor head for arithmetic; on an earlier occasion in Pentonville he

    had reaped criticism on the LPC4 form: »He is not a suitable person on

    account of mental incapacity vide particulars of length of drop.«334 Now,

    again, prison doctor James Liddell criticized him for being not good at figures

    and not certain of working out drops.335 He was never again called upon as

    principal, and disappeared from the list in the following year (1941).

    Another series of executions was caused by the war as well. There were

    American soldiers in Britain — »overpaid, oversexed and – over here«, as the

    saying went. The United States of America (Visiting Forces) Act 1942 ruled

    which criminal law was to be applied to them if necessary: their own military

    law. This meant that delinquent American soldiers – even if their crime was

    not a military one – were tried, in Britain, by American military courts. Prison

    terms could be served in Shepton Mallet Prison (in Somerset in South West

    England). This old jail, dating from the beginning of the 17th century had

  • 173

    been closed in 1930 but was re-opened as a military prison for the British

    army in October 1939. In mid-1942 it was handed over to the Americans as a

    military prison. In the case of the death penalty — in the US military code

    still available for rape at that time — the methods of »musketry« (shooting

    by firing party) and hanging were eligible. A firing party had to be assembled

    by the US Army themselves, but when it came to hanging, they were required

    to resort to civil experts.

    Thus it came to pass that the Pierrepoints, uncle Tom and nephew Albert,

    were summoned 16 times all in all to Shepton Mallet where an annex with a

    British style gallows had been erected. Sources disagree whether Thomas

    Pierrepoint was the principal at all executions or at 13 only (with Albert

    Pierrepoint responsible for the remaining three). It is remarkable that in these

    executions, British and American traditions were mixed. The gallows, the

    pinions, the rope, the execution method proper were British; the time (1 a.m.)

    and the formalities preceding the final act, with the reading of charge sheet

    and sentence, prayer, last words of the culprit etc. were American. One such

    execution is featured in the opening scene of Robert Aldrich‘s movie »The

    Dirty Dozen« (1967): The rope used is of the British type but is put on over a

    black (instead of white) hood and is facing the wrong way at that, and US

    military police are officiating as executioners – to name just the most blatant

    mistakes.

    In his memoirs, Albert Pierrepoint says very candidly that waiting idly on

    the scaffold for perhaps six minutes was hard to get accustomed to whereas

    otherwise he would be looking down the open trap doors after twenty

    seconds. This delay caused by formalities he found very irksome. Others

    suffered from it, too: Pierrepoint reports that on one occasion, the officer of

    the escort fell down in a faint.336

    Other trials were related to the war, too: German prisoners of war faced trial

    for the murder of fellow prisoners. On 6 October 1945, at Pentonville, five

    German prisoners of war were hanged in five single executions. Stewart

    McLaughlin relates the preliminary events thus:

    In September, 1944, the German POWs (i.e. the five just mentioned, TV) had all been

    incarcerated at a camp in Devizes, Wiltshire, where they had been working on an

    elaborate escape plan. The ringleader was Erich Pallme Koenig, a fervent Nazi. But it

    all came to nothing, for in December the plan was discovered. The result was that a

  • 174

    number of prisoners were swiftly transferred to Comrie in Perthshire – not exactly

    Colditz, but where, if nothing else, escape would be that much harder.

    Did someone betray the escape plan? If so, who was it? Koenig and his unofficial

    camp committee were convinced that it was Sergeant-Major Wolfgang Rostberg, a

    regular soldier in the German army, as distinct from a wartime conscript. Unlike many

    of the other POWs, Rostberg was in his mid-30s and not a Nazi. He could speak

    English and was employed as the camp’s interpreter, which meant that he was in

    constant contact with the British authorities.

    Soon after the prisoners arrived at Comrie, Rostberg was dragged from his bed and

    given a summary »trial« by a group of Nazi POWs thirsting for revenge. He was found

    guilty of betraying the escape attempt. He was beaten until he was unrecognisable

    and then hanged in a washroom building.337

    The murder weapon in the

    Rosterg case is still

    preserved as an exhibit in

    folder WO 208/46333 of the

    British National Archive.

    This account is a rather distorted and shortened version, though. The

    problems start with the names of the persons involved. The internet as well

    as the literature teems with a multitude of wrong spellings, probably dating

    back to the newspaper coverage of the trial. The Online Grave Search of the

    Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge (German equivalent to the

    Imperial War Graves Commission) yields the following data:

    The murdered man was Feldwebel (sergeant major) Wolfgang Rosterg, and

    he was born on 17 December 1909 in Wiesbaden. He died on 23 December

  • 175

    1944, and he is buried at Cannock Chase War Cemetery in Staffordshire:

    Section 4, row 15, grave 207.

    Wolfgang Rosterg’s grave in Cannock Chase, Staffordshire

    During the trial of his murderers it came to light that he had been asked

    during the mock trial whether he was a Nazi, and he had replied: »Certainly

    not.«338 This disclosure was courageous but unwise: In Comrie, it was the 150

    percent Nazis who set the tone.

    At Devizes, Rosterg had served as interpreter to Jim Gaiger, camp Clerk of

    Works. Gaiger remembers him as »very thick, … thirteen stone possibly«, with

    »pebbled glasses«.339 According to de Normann, Rosterg was the son of a

    »reasonably wealthy« industrialist in the conglomerate of IG Farben.340 This

    can only refer to August Rosterg, at the time majority stockholder and CEO

    of the Wintershall AG (potash works, oil production) as well as member of the

    »Freundeskreis Reichsführer-SS«.341

    If August and Wolfgang Rosterg were indeed father and son, we have here

    a remarkable family constellation: The father supports the Nazis with money,

  • 176

    and the son is killed for his enmity to Nazism which, however, seems to have

    been of only recent date: Again according to de Normann, in the early thirties

    he had been in England for educational reasons and, at that time, had given

    the impression to some of those whom he met as being very much imbued

    with the Nazi ideals.342 But this must have changed distinctly within a few

    years and may have led to an alienation of father and son. As early as 1941,

    August Rosterg entered into a testamentary contract with his eldest son

    Heinz Rosterg, according to which Heinz forwent his heritage but was

    entitled to capitalize on the whole (!) property and to cash in the Wintershall

    dividends343 – this amounted naturally to the disinheritance of Wolfgang

    who, at that time, was still alive.

    The men sentenced for Rosterg's murder were (spelling of the names,

    again, according to the Volksbund web site) Oberfähnrich (cadet 1st class)

    Erich Palme-König (21), Unteroffizier (sergeant) Joachim Goltz (20), Soldat

    (private) Kurt Zühlsdorff (20), Gefreiter (private first class) Josef Mertens (22)

    and Obergefreiter (corporal) Heinrich-Wernhard Brüning (22). All of these five

    are shown as having died on 6 October 1945 and as being buried in

    »Pentonville Prison Cemetery«.

    The ranks as given above need some correction, though: According to the

    trial report of the Salt Lake Tribune344, Goltz was SS-Unterscharführer,

    Zühlsdorff SS-Mann, and Brüning SS-Rottenführer, while Mertens is

    designated as Matrose (seaman). The Volksbund web site gives the

    equivalent army ranks.

    The escape plan allegedly betrayed by Rosterg was »The Giant Thing«. The

    escape planners at Devizes, »blacks« according to British categorization (i.e.

    hard-boiled Nazis) allegedly had planned to furnish themselves, after the

    escape, with weapons and vehicles, even tanks, by raiding neighbouring

    military establishments, to free comrades from other camps and to march to

    the East coast where they would find paratroopers and ships sent to meet

    them!345

    A hair-raising story with seemingly but little core of reality.346 American

    interrogators had extracted it from two prisoners of war named Storch and

    Wunderlich. Storch pretended to cooperate with them in the frustration of

    this plan while on the other hand he followed his very own and quite different

    escape plan. It was a giant and fatal mess of rumours, lies, and intrigues, even

    more complicated by the fact that almost at the same time the decrypting

  • 177

    wizards of the Government Code and Cipher School in Bletchley Park cracked

    a wireless message by the German supreme command, asking for English-

    speaking hand-to-hand combat experts who should volunteer for a Special

    Mission. This message, as we know today, concerned the formation of a

    special unit, the 150th SS Tank Brigade under SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto

    Skorzeny, which was to operate behind enemy lines during the Battle of the

    Bulge (»Unternehmen Greif«). The English however saw a connection to the

    escape story, and panicked. On 14 December 1944, Camp Devizes was

    surrounded by B company of the 8th Battalion of the Parachute Regiment. 32

    ringleaders were loaded into buses and brought first to »London Cage«, the

    interrogation center of MI19, later to Comrie POW camp. For whatever

    reason, Rosterg was included in this transport, although he had nothing to

    do with either the escape plan or its discovery. This mistake of the English

    contributed to Rosterg's murder.

    When the guards, in the morning of 23 December 1944, found Rosterg's

    body hanging from a rope with his face beaten to pulp, they at first believed

    they could save him, but then had to realize he was dead. The murder

    investigation did not get under way in a truly professional manner until, by

    the end of March, 1945, Lt.-Col. Archibald Wilson who had formerly served

    with the police took over the camp and Captain John Wheatley was assigned

    to Comrie murder as a special investigator. He was a barrister and a member

    of the Judge Advocate General's Department. Staff Sergeant Herbert Sulzbach,

    a German Jew, supported him as interpreter. Wheatley was an obviously very

    able lawyer, for after the war he rose to be »Lord Justice Clerk«, the second

    highest rank of a judge in Scotland, and was ennobled as »Baron Wheatley of

    Shettleston«.

    The chief problem for him and his staff was to find witnesses who would

    give evidence and stick to it. None of the other prisoners was ready to give

    evidence against Rosterg's murderers as long as there was danger that at

    home in Germany it might get known and then perhaps their family would

    suffer for their »betrayal«. This fear continued even until after the war, when

    in July 1945 the trial took place: The court gave assurance that the names of

    the witnesses being heard would not appear in the Press, and admitted only

    those reporters who agreed to this restriction. Of the twelve men who had

    originally been charged, eight faced trial. Six were found guilty and were

    condemned to death; one of them was reprieved to serve a life term.347

  • 178

    Harry B. Allen was one of the two assistants at the execution of the Five, and

    afterwards noted in his execution diary, rather appalled:

    The five following prisoners are the most callous men I have ever met so far but I

    blame the Nazi doctrine for that it must be a terrible creed.348

    On 16 November 1945 two more German prisoners of war were hanged at

    Pentonville. PFC Armin Kühne (18) and Sergeant-Major Emil Schmittendorf

    (31) were the ringleaders of an action during which on 24 March 1945 at

    Lodge Moor POW camp near Sheffield hundreds lunged out at a fellow

    prisoner, Sergeant Gerhart Rettig (25) and beat him up. Rettig was taken to

    hospital alive but died there from cerebral bleeding and today lies buried on

    Cannock Chase War Cemetery.349 Again suspicion played a role, just as with

    Rosterg, that Rettig had given away an escape plan. And again, the suspicion

    was unfounded: The British had known about it for a long time, they did not

    need a »traitor«.

    To this day, the seven comrade murderers lie buried in the prison cemetery

    at Pentonville. The Exhumation/Reburial Service of the Volksbund Deutsche

    Kriegsgräberfürsorge could not be told the place of burial by the British

    authorities.350 This appears strange, for the keeping of precise burial

    documentation was part of the regulations, and the Pentonville burial

    register in particular ought to have been available at least until 1965, for in

    this year the Irish national hero Sir Roger Casement, hanged at Pentonville

    in 1916, was exhumed and brought home. For this, the existence of

    documents was a prerequisite, since the graves were not marked by any signs.

    When World War II was over, the services of Albert Pierrepoint were no longer

    needed just for murderers and spies but also for settling the account with

    traitors and war criminals. The Royal Warrant of 14 June 1945 for the Trial of

    War Criminals provided for shooting or hanging in the case of a death

    sentence. The Americans, in their occupation zone, used the Bavarian

    executioner Johann Reichhart, who had already executed more than 3,000

    persons between 1924 and 1945.351 Reichhart at first conducted some

    executions alone; later, on 28 and 29 May 1946 at War Criminals Prison No.

    1 Landsberg/Lech, he took turns on two gallows with an American hangman,

  • 179

    Master Sergeant John C. Woods. The US army shot films of these executions

    in which Reichhart can be identified without doubt: a skinny man in his mid-

    50s wearing a white shirt and a bow tie.

    The British were different: If the war criminals were not to face a firing

    party, they should be executed by their own foremost expert and to domestic

    standards. They settled for Hameln Prison as the place of execution and

    Albert Pierrepoint as executioner. The Royal Engineers built an execution

    chamber in the West wing of the prison. The first to die there were the

    condemned of the Bergen-Belsen trial which had taken place from 17

    September to 17 November 1945 at Lüneburg: Josef Kramer, Irma Grese,

    Johanna Bormann, Elisabeth Volkenrath and seven others plus two

    condemned from a different trial.

    I do not know of a construction drawing which would indicate where

    precisely this place of execution was. But at least the approximate location

    can be gathered from Pierrepoint's memoirs:

    Inside Hameln Gaol on this day352 the Royal Engineers had just finished building the

    execution chamber, at the end of one of the wings. It lay on the right hand side of a long corridor adjoining the condemned cells, which were the smallest cells I have ever seen human beings confined in.353

    Further, it would have been logical to install the gallows room in the first

    floor, just like in an execution suite of British build. Which would have meant

    to break a hole in the floor slab between ground floor and first floor; in the

    ground floor the body could then be taken off the rope and put in the coffin.

    Hameln local historian Bernhard Gelderblom354 provided me with a photo

    which shows, at the end of the West

    wing, next to the annex erected after

    the war, a ground floor exit door

    which would have been very apt for

    bringing the coffins outdoors and to

    the graves which were probably close

    to the West wing.

    Hameln Gaol, narrow side of West wing from

    the South. The annex was added after the war.

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    From Gelderblom's collection as well stems a plan of the »Strafanstalt

    Hameln« labelled »2. Obergeschoß« (2nd floor), of which the part showing

    the West wing looks like this:

    It is plain to see that there was a large cell at the end of the wing anyway

    on the second floor. If this was the case on the first floor as well, it would

    have been the obvious choice to install the execution room in this large cell.

    It is tempting to assume that some of the markings refer not to the second

    but to the first floor, the plan of which presumably conformed to the second

    but may have been lost.

    Some original interior walls have been marked later as »removed« by

    crosses in black ink. Some of these crosses have been emphasized by retouch

    in red ink and give the impression that, by tearing down walls, the large cell

    at the end of the wing (No. 214) was joined with two adjacent smaller cells

    (No. 215, 216). As one can gather from the dimensioning of the cells on the

    opposite side of the landing, No. 212 and 213, removing the interior walls

    creates a room of approximately 3.8 by 6 meters with two windows. The

    doors of cells 214 and 215 from the landing should obviously be bricked up

    – they are crossed out in the plan, too. Is this where the Hameln place of

    execution was formed? The room would certainly be large enough. It also

    answers Pierrepoint‘s description (at the end of the corridor, to the right) and

    fits the usual situation of an execution suite – except for the fact that the

    second floor does not fit for a place of execution at all.

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    And there is a further problem. Gelderblom owns, from the estate of a German

    prison officer, a probably unique photo which allegedly (!) shows the break

    in the ceiling as it looked after the removal of the Hameln trap doors.

    Ceiling penetration in Hameln Gaol.

    Oral tradition connected to this photo

    says this was the trap door opening. But

    can this be true?

    The observer looks from below upwards through an oblong opening of

    which the narrow side is to the left. The longitudinal axles of the trap door

    and of the gallows beam would then have run parallel to the wall in which

    you see the window on the photo. One would like to identify the window with

    the window in the South wall of cell 214 (or of the equivalent cell on the first

    floor) because it is only there that the distance between the left edge of the

    window and the corner of the room would fit – but that's impossible.

    It is clearly visible that the window is divided into square panes: Three

    vertically and six horizontally. The photo of the South wall from outside

    shows that there was no such window on the first or second floor, just on the

    ground floor.

    This leaves us with an insoluble riddle: The plan with its striking out of

    walls and doors points – if taken literally - to the second floor as the site of

    the gallows, the logic and the British use to the first floor, and the photo to

    the ground floor — but this cannot be true either, for Albert Pierrepoint says,

    referring to the execution morning:

    We climbed the stairs to the cells where the condemned were waiting …355

    (Italics mine.) This rules out the ground floor, but the precise site of the

    Hameln gallows remains undecided.

    The Royal Engineers had evidently dispensed with sound insulation as

    would be found in a British prison. Pierrepoint reports:

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    I had come to the decision that I must take the women first. The condemned cells

    were so close to the scaffold that the prisoners could not but hear the repeated sounds of the drop. I did not wish to subject the women for too long to this. I determined to carry out the execution of the women, singly, at the start, and follow

    with double executions for the men.356

    Pierrepoint's description of the condemned cells at any rate admits of the

    supposition that they were the same size as those depicted in the plan: »The

    cell was far too small for me to go inside, and I had to pinion her (Irma Grese)

    in the corridor.«357 At a bit over five square meters space and a length of

    about 3.8 meters they could only have a width of a bit over 1.3 meters; in

    some cases, a width of only 1.27 meters is entered in the plan.

    Something made the task very special for Pierrepoint: He was alone. The

    military government had flown him in and treated him like a lieutenant

    colonel358, but denied him a trained assistant. Instead, Regimental Sergeant

    Major Richard O'Neill, otherwise working with the Control Commission, had

    been detailed for him. Pierrepoint was appalled at first at the prospect of

    working with an absolute novice, but the cooperation went much better than

    anticipated.

    O'Neill continued to be Pierrepoint‘s assistant for all executions in Hameln

    which followed. Later, there were additional assistants: Alexander Hurry (29

    times on 8 and 11 October 1946, and on 7 March 1947), Sergeant Joseph

    Hunter of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (12 times on 22 and 23 January

    1947), and Edwin J. Roper (all 45 executions between 5 September 1947 and

    30 January 1948). Roper had been chief executioner in Shanghai and Hong

    Kong between 1935 and 1946.359

    Pierrepoint's second difficulty consisted in the fact that directly at the

    outset he had to deal with condemned persons of very extreme build. Josef

    Kramer for instance, camp commander of Bergen-Belsen, stood 6 foot 2 and

    weighed 205 pounds. SS overseer Johanna Bormann, on the other hand, was

    a foot shorter and weighed less than half his bulk. Other condemned, too, did

    not bring much on the scales, presumably because of the undernourishment

    typical of the time. Sometimes it was a problem for Pierrepoint how to give

    those lightweight prisoners enough drop energy. Pierrepoint did what he

    thought necessary, even if this meant departure from the »table«: In the case

    of Johanna Bormann, Pierrepoint exceeded the maximum, giving her 8 foot 8

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    inches of drop. It seems that Haughton's suggestion to attach weights to the

    feet if necessary was not acted on; perhaps Pierrepoint did not know of it.

    Pierrepoint hanged all 13 condemned in one day. This was the first time

    that such a physical and mental effort was asked of him, but it was not to be

    the last time: Pierrepoint hanged 16 condemned on 8 October 1946, 12 on

    11 October 1946, 13 on 26 June 1947, 14 on 5 September 1947, 16 on 14

    November 1947, and 15 on 26 February 1948.

    In the morning at 9:34 a.m. he began with the execution of Elisabeth

    Volkenrath360; in the afternoon at 4:17 p.m. the trap doors opened for the last

    time, dropping two men. For this to happen in such a short time, it was

    necessary however to take the hanged persons off the rope earlier than was

    customary in England.

    As soon as it became clear how many condemned were to be hanged during

    each of Pierrepoint’s visits, the Director of Medical Services (following a

    request by Brigadier Edmund J. Paton Walsh) turned to Dr. F. E. Buckland,

    Assistant Director of Pathology with the British Army of the Rhine, who was

    to be the acting medical officer attending the executions at Hameln.361 He

    asked him whether he thought that there was any objection to inject the

    bodies immediately after the execution with a lethal dose of a chemical

    solution in order to guarantee that they could be taken down without delay.

    In other words: There was fear that it might be impossible to manage the

    execution workload if, as in England, a full hour had to pass between

    execution and release from the rope in Hameln, too. Dr. Buckland did not see

    any grounds for ethical objections and deemed 10 cc of chloroform

    appropriate.

    He was convinced that the condemned did not feel anything of what

    happened after their drop through the trap doors because they were deeply

    unconscious by then. They had to die anyway – the doctor's syringe just

    shortened this process; one might even say: mercifully. Whether Dr. Buckland

    included the Hippocratic Oath in his ethical deliberations (»I will not

    administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so«) is a different question,

    however.

    During the series of executions on 13 December 1945 this course was

    followed. As soon as the trap doors had opened, Dr. Buckland went down into

    the pit, mounted a step ladder and listened to the heartbeat for half a minute.

    He then injected 10 cc of chloroform; in some cases directly into the heart,

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    in others intravenously into the arm. The former led to instant stoppage of

    the heart, the latter after a few seconds.

    When Pierrepoint came to Hameln for the next time – a series of eight

    executions on 8 March 1946 – the physician contended himself with

    listening to the heartbeat by stethoscope, and taking notes of the duration.

    Result: Audible heartbeat ceased after 15 minutes at the latest.

    Ten executions were scheduled in Hameln for 15 May, and there was an

    electrocardiograph at the ready. In four of the five double executions on this

    day, one of the two men dropped through the trap doors simultaneously was

    hoisted up again by means of block and tackle. He was released from the

    noose and laid on a table. At this moment, Dr. Buckland's colleagues Major

    N. Compston and Major J. M. Zabokrzycki, who had not been present during

    the execution, entered the room and wired the body to the

    electrocardiograph.

    Already the first subject, Erwin Hoffmann, started to breathe again while

    on the ECG table, and was immediately injected with chloroform; the time

    was 7 ½ minutes after the opening of the trap doors. Since this ECG record

    was no longer significant due to the artificial stoppage of the heart, the

    doctors took the second executee, Friedrich Uhrig, as a replacement. The

    same thing happened during the third double execution of the day: Wilhelm

    Scharschmidt's breathing restarted during the application of the electrodes.

    He got a chloroform injection, and in his stead Emil Günther was connected

    to the electrocardiograph, 15 minutes after execution. Meanwhile his

    heartbeat was no longer audible by stethoscope. At the end of the day the

    British had ECG readings of four hanged men: Friedrich Uhrig, Ludwig Lang,

    Emil Günther, and Otto Bopf. Now they knew that inaudible heartbeat could

    be recorded until up to 25 minutes after the opening of the trap doors. On 8

    October 1946, it was noted in 15 executions how long after execution knee

    and ankle jerk reflexes could be elicited. It turned out that this was rarely

    possible later than one minute after execution, and that it ended in every

    case before the heartbeat became inaudible. Summing up, Dr. Buckland wrote

    after these 53 executions: For practical purposes it was »safe« to certify a

    hanged person dead as soon as the heartbeat was no longer audible – i.e.

    after 15 minutes at the latest –, and therefore to aim at executions in half-

    hourly intervals. This schedule was adhered to in all following execution

    batches, as the recorded times show362. I do not know whether chloroform

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    injections were used on later occasions either systematically or, as just

    shown, in an emergency. Of course nothing of all this came into the papers.

    Nor did Pierrepoint mention a word of it when writing his memoirs in 1974.

    Pierrepoint performed 199 executions in the old penitentiary on the Weser

    banks – by no means on Germans only nor exclusively on war criminals.

    There were 41 Displaced Persons among them as well, who had been

    roaming the country after their liberation and who had begun robbing and

    killing. There were also two court-martialled British soldiers: 28-year-old

    Driver Francis J. Upson, who had killed a 60-year-old German woman in

    August 1946, in the French sector of Berlin, and MP Serjeant Charles E.

    Patrick, also 28 years old, who had killed, in January 1947, his (Scottish) girl

    friend.

    The British army dealt with their black sheep in a more merciful way than

    the American: Unlike the Americans executed in the European theater of war,

    Upson and Patrick are not buried in a hidden and almost inaccessible place,

    cleanly separated from the »honourable« dead363, but lie buried in Hanover

    War Cemetery among their comrades. Admittedly, in a corner to themselves:

    In the far right corner near the enclosure, graves 36 and 37, row D, field 18.

    (Row D has just these two graves…).

    German right wing radicals over many years surrounded the graves of the

    executed persons in Hameln (and, by the way, as well the graves of those

    hanged at US War Criminals Prison Landsberg) with a great amount of

    national pathos, trying to portray these war criminals as small cogs in the

    machine or as innocent victims of an arbitrary winners’ justice. In order to

    counter this, the city of Hameln, in 1988, commissioned a documentary364. It

    shows who the hanged persons were, and with which acts they had been

    charged. Several myths are proved wrong in it, e.g. the one about a 25-year-

    old German, allegedly hanged on 6 December 1949 for the possession of a

    few cartridges. It really was a Polish D.P., and his crime was the murder of a

    policeman.

    In the present context, I content myself with stating that – apart from the

    chloroform injections mentioned above and the 30-minutes-interval – I did

    not find any hints that in the Hameln executions anything happened

    differently from the executions of »normal« murderers at the same time in

    England.

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    In September 1946, Pierrepoint was commissioned to travel to Graz. Austria,

    too, was occupied by the Allies; there was a British Occupation Zone

    (consisting of Carinthia and Styria plus the British sector of Vienna), and there

    were military courts. At that time, eight violent criminals were lying in Graz-

    Karlau jail under sentence of death.365 Pierrepoint was to perform their

    executions and to instruct the Austrian executioners detailed as his assistants

    – one of them was Vienna-based Leopold Zaglauer – in the English method

    of the long drop. A gallows of the British type had already been built in the

    Graz Landesgericht by Royal Engineers.366

    Until then, execution by hanging was already known in Austria and had

    been practised since imperial times, but in a completely different manner:

    Two assistants lifted the condemned along a vertical pole without horizontal

    branch or similar. The upper end featured an iron hook. The executioner

    stood on a platform or ladder behind the pole, put a short, thin, soaped cord

    around the man’s neck and fastened it to the hook. Thereupon the assistants

    dropped the condemned and pulled him down, adding their own weight. The

    principle and mode of action is therefore comparable to British strangulation

    of Calcraft's (or even earlier) times.

    Austrian hangman Josef Lang after the

    execution of »traitor« Cesare Battisti on

    the throttling pole, Trento 1916

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    Anyway, Pierrepoint reports that after the Graz executions the Austrians

    trained by him immediately declared that they wanted to in future use the

    British method only, which was acceded to.367 That was precisely what the

    British authorities had in mind from the outset. In a September 1946368

    minute of the Prison Commission we read:

    Pierrepoint is at present in Vienna where he is employed by the Control Commission

    executing some Austrian criminals with a view to introducing the English method of

    execution into that country.

    Since the British occupation authority, in building the Graz gallows, had

    already created precedents and made investments, it may be assumed that

    the decision on the future method of execution was already made and did

    not depend on the opinion of the Austrian hangmen.

    The English gallows however seems to have been used in Austria

    exclusively for executions under British occupation law. Death sentences of

    the civil Austrian criminal courts continued to be executed, until abolition in

    1950, on the traditional pole.369

    The Bergen-Belsen trial, the further war criminals trials and subsequent

    executions made Albert Pierrepoint's name appear in the Press more often

    than suited himself and the Home Office. And when, in the first days of

    October 1946, the sentences were handed down in the Nuremberg trial of

    the major war criminals, newspapers started to announce that he would be

    the executioner, or even claimed that he had already arrived at Nuremberg.370

    This was utter nonsense, as even the newspapers of the day could have

    known. Nuremberg was in the US Occupation Zone – it was inconceivable

    that the Americans would not remain at the helm in the execution of the

    sentences. The Nuremberg executions were entrusted to the executioner of

    the Third US Army, Master Sergeant Woods. Lieutenant Stanley Tilles was

    charged with the organization. According to Tilles' memoirs, Woods together

    with five military policemen helping him (among them Joseph Malta who

    later assisted in the executions) built three gallows, dismountable into three

    parts each, in the Landsberg prison shop. On the day previous to the

    executions, the team conveyed the gallows to Nuremberg on trucks and

    erected them in the gymnasium of the Nuremberg war criminals prison.

    Immediately after the executions they were brought back to Landsberg, and

    destroyed.371 Therefore it seems to be a myth that, as Dachs372 writes, it was

    Johann Reichhart who supervised the erection of the Nuremberg gallows.

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    According to the report of the American correspondent of the International

    News Service, Kingsbury Smith, the gallows were used alternately during the

    executions; i.e. on gallows no. 2 a hanging took place while the previous

    condemned was still hanging on gallows no. 1, and was possibly not even

    certified dead yet. The third gallows was kept as reserve.

    American executions, like Canadian and Australian ones, can be used

    within the scope of this book for short comparisons only. The following hints

    may suffice:

    Unlike its 1947 counterpart, the 1944 US Army pamphlet on executions did

    not feature a drop table and no instruction on how to tie the knot. This may

    mean that during the time in which this pamphlet was current (which

    includes the time of the Nuremberg hangings), the standard drop was used

    (but the length of this »standard« was not given in the pamphlet either), or

    that the decision on the length was left to the executioner in every case. It

    would then have been very crucial how experienced and how deft he was.

    Now what about Master Sergeant Woods in this regard?

    About him, until very recently only what had been in the papers in 1946

    was known. Time Magazine, for instance, credited him with 15 years

    experience as hangman and 347 executions till then.373 However US Colonel

    French MacLean (ret.)374 succeeded in finding and evaluating army files which

    had been inaccessible for a long time. Things were like this: If one of the

    American soldiers based in Britain was sentenced to death, the Americans

    engaged the Pierrepoints. But rather soon after the invasion into Normandy,

    US courts martial handed down death sentences in France, too, and it was

    obviously neither practical to make the Pierrepoints come into the country

    every time, nor possible to find a Frenchman with hanging skills. Therefore

    the US Army started searching the own ranks. In reply to the enquiry, Woods

    came forward, claiming to have assisted, before the war, at (civil) executions

    twice in Texas and Oklahoma, respectively. The army believed his claim

    without check-up (it was probably a lie; proof of Woods' alleged experience

    was never found).

    Woods, until then a private soldier in an Engineer unit, was promoted to

    Master Sergeant in one day, and transferred to Loire Disciplinary Training

    Center. 1944/45 he was indeed involved in the execution of about 40

    delinquent US soldiers as hangman or assistant. This is not a very large

    number, and quite a few of them are labelled by MacLean as »botched«.

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    Nevertheless, in October 1946 Woods was not so inexperienced that one

    needs to believe Dachs' claim375 that Johann Reichhart had to instruct the

    Master Sergeant in the art of hanging.

    According to MacLean's book, as early as 1930 Woods had been examined

    by a psychiatric board in connection with a court martial – diagnosis:

    »Constitutional Psychopathic Inferiority without Psychosis«376 – and was a

    hard drinker in 1946.377 At Nuremberg, he worked coarsely and gorily – but

    it can be shown that his brother hangmen in the US prisons at home did not

    work a whit better.

    More or less simultaneously to Pierrepoint's executions in Germany, the

    accounts were settled with traitors in England.

    Four trials were not conducted under the Treachery Act but under the

    Treason Act. Two of them ended with a death sentence, but the prisoners

    were reprieved to serve life terms: Walter Purdy and Thomas Cooper.

    Obviously they were considered to be followers in treason, not leaders or

    heads. They were released as early as 1953 and 1954. The two other cases

    however became causes célèbres. One of them was the trial of William Joyce

    aka »Lord Haw-Haw«, the other the one of John Amery.

    William Joyce, shortly after being taken

    prisoner

    During the war, the Reichssender Hamburg transmitted propaganda

    broadcasts in English, called »Germany calling«. The broadcasters were

    known in Britain by their collective nickname »Lord Haw-Haw« (their speech

    reminded of the »haw-haw, dammit-get-out-of-my-way«-kind of English

    associated with a snooty lord). From 1940 on William Joyce became the

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    almost exclusive broadcaster and thus to his listeners finally the Lord Haw-

    Haw.

    William Joyce378 was born in 1906 in Brooklyn, NY to an Irish-catholic father

    and a CoE mother (therefore US citizen by birth), but three years later the

    family returned to Galway (Irland). In 1932, William Joyce joined Sir Oswald

    Mosley's British Union of Fascists but left it later to found his own National

    Socialist League.

    On 4 July 1934 he surreptitiously obtained a British passport by stating

    »Galway« as his place of birth. (As early as 1922, his father Michael Joyce had

    claimed in a letter to an authority: »We are all British and not American

    citizens«). 1938 and again in August 1939 he had his passport renewed for a

    year.

    In 1939, he was warned that the government would intern him when war

    broke out. Thereupon, on 26 August 1939, he fled to Germany. In the same

    year he started his propaganda work for the Nazi radio which he continued

    throughout the war. In 1940, he gained German citizenship. On 28 May 1945

    he was picked up by British troops near Flensburg, close to the Danish border.

    On 16 June 1945 he was brought back to England. His trial, however, did not

    start until 17 September, partly because his citizenship had to be checked

    beforehand by enquiry in the USA.

    The prosecution charged him with three counts of treason. Joyce defended

    himself saying that he was not British and therefore could not have

    committed treason. The prosecutor however argued that at least the third

    count must stand: While his British passport was valid, he was entitled to

    claim diplomatic protection of which the complement was a duty of

    allegiance towards the king. He had violated this duty by making broadcasts

    for the Germans, i.e. the king’s enemies, between 18 September 1939 and 2

    July 1940, i.e. while his passport was valid.

    The judge decided that Joyce‘s line of argument was correct with regard to

    the first two counts, but that the prosecutor was right with regard to count 3.

    He charged the jurors to find Joyce not guilty with regard to count 1 and 2,

    and to find him guilty with regard to count 3 if they were convinced that

    Joyce had made the broadcasts in question. The jury decided: Not guilty with

    regard to count 1 and 2, guilty with regard to count 3. The judge sentenced

    William Joyce to death as traitor.

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    Joyce's counsel, Gerald Slade KC, went to the Court of Appeal on 30 October

    1945. He submitted that the judge made an error in law when charging the

    jury. The king had been unable to give diplomatic protection to Joyce during

    the time in question. Nor had Joyce, as an American citizen, ever thought of

    claiming such protection. If protection was neither claimed nor really

    possible, then there was no duty of allegiance either. Therefore Joyce could

    not be found guilty under count 3 of the indictment.

    The appeal judges decided on 7 November along the same lines as the

    prosecutor and the judge: The mere ownership of a British passport was

    sufficient. However a second appeal, this time to the House of Lords, was

    allowed because this was a fundamental and important question in law.

    A House of Lords committee presided over by the Lord Chancellor heard

    the appeal from 10 to 13 December, and rejected it on 18 December with a

    4:1 vote. The decision was upheld: Whoever carries a British passport – no

    matter whether rightfully or not – owes allegiance, and is able to commit

    treason.

    On 3 January 1946, Joyce was hanged at Wandsworth by Albert Pierrepoint.

    Critics later claimed that in this decision »subject of the crown« and

    »passport owner« had been improperly rolled into one, but it was only the

    former who owed allegiance.379 And even if the mere ownership of a British

    passport did bind a person in allegiance to the king: It was never proved that

    Joyce actually kept (as opposed to: destroyed) his British passport after

    crossing the German border and during the time of his alleged treasonable

    acts.380

    The trial of the second traitor started after Joyce's. It ended with an execution

    before Joyce had exhausted his appeals. It was the trial of John Amery.

    John Amery was the son of Conservative politician Leo Amery (colonial

    minister 1924-1929 and, during the Second World War, secretary for India).

    From early years, the young man was a problem for his father and for

    everybody else involved in his upbringing. He was the proverbial Black

    Sheep, ignored good manners and laws alike, married a former prostitute at

    age 21, failed in every business enterprise he tried, was in constant need of

    money, and finally turned fascist out of anti-communist motivation. In 1936,

    he was bankrupt and went to France. He later told his family that he had

    taken part in the Spanish civil war on Franco's side, but this was not true.

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    Only in 1939, after the civil war, was he in Spain for a few weeks before

    returning to France. There he stayed after the outbreak of the war, later went

    to Germany, met Hitler, did pro-German radio propaganda, and tried to form

    a British Free Corps under German command from British prisoners of war.

    Towards the end of the war he was in Italy to support Mussolini, was taken

    prisoner by Italian partisans at the end of April 1945, and handed over to the

    British.

    On 28 November 1945, he stood trial at the Old Bailey, facing an indictment

    containing eight counts of treason. His younger brother Julian Amery had

    done his utmost to find proof that John had acquired Spanish citizenship

    during his stay in Spain before the war. That was what John had claimed –

    and what would have made him a foreigner who was not subject to the

    Treason Act.

    This line of defence, however, fell flat; John Amery had not become a

    Spaniard. Now how could he defend himself? Should he go into the witness

    box and assert that he never intended to commit treason? In view of the

    activities which could be proved against him this was not very promising.

    Father and brother consulted with counsel (Amery, too, was defended by

    Gerald Slade KC) and arrived at the conclusion that it was better for John to

    plead guilty and hope for a reprieve. John agreed.381 Hence no evidence was

    taken, there were no pleadings – eight minutes after the trial had started the

    judge already pronounced sentence of death.

    Rebecca West, present as an observer, wrote:

    Mr. Slade hoped that Amery would afterwards be reprieved because he was the son of

    a loved and valued public servant. The prosecuting counsel … did all he could to

    dissuade Mr. Slade, pointing out that the social climate would never permit such a

    concession to one of the governing classes, and of course he was right. Mr. Slade was

    in the wrong century … by the time the First World War was over few people in any

    class would have considered it proper that a great man should be rewarded for his

    greatness by exemption of his son from the penalty which would certainly have been

    inflicted on the son of a poor man.382

    Amery's mother wrote imploring letters to the Home Secretary. Other

    public figures, too, spoke in favour of a reprieve.

    In support of his mercy petition, Leo Amery submitted a psychiatrist's

    expertise. Dr. Edward Glover had not been allowed to examine John Amery

    but he had talked to many family members and acquaintances. He came to

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    the conclusion that John Amery was afflicted with »moral imbecility«. This

    would place Amery within the scope of the Mental Deficiency Act 1913. This

    law defined four recognized forms of imbecility: Three degrees of intellectual

    weakness (ranging from »idiocy« to »feeble-mindedness«) and, as a fourth

    form, »moral imbecility«. This encompassed, according to the law:

    … persons who from an early age display some permanent defect coupled with strong

    vicious or criminal propensities on which punishment has had little or no deterrent

    effect. 383

    Dr. Glover accordingly wrote, regarding John Amery:

    His behaviour is governed by … diseased mental processes to such an extent that he

    is incapable of a normal appreciation of consequences and is devoid of the moral

    sense by which normal people control their actions and utterances.384

    Home Secretary James Chuter Ede, a Labour man, did something very

    unusual: He commissioned two more psychiatrists to investigate the Amery

    case – these two as well declared that John Amery was unable to form moral

    judgments about his own conduct, and recommended not to execute him.

    The English Home Secretary was not left alone with such decisions of

    mercy. One of his highest-ranking officials had the task to advise him. In this

    case, it was Sir Frank A. Newsam. He summed up the situation thus:

    Sir Frank A. Newsam's signature

    For many years, he was one of the highest-ranking

    officials in the Home Department.

    First, the legal aspect – none oft he psychiatrists (not even Dr. Glover) had

    said Amery was insane under the »M'Naghten Rules« applicable in England.

    These rules boiled down to two questions: »Did the prisoner know what he

    was doing? And if so – did he know it was (morally/legally) wrong?« Only if

    the answer to one of these questions was »no« was it a case of insanity in

    the legal sense. None of the professional opinions however declared Amery

    insane under these rules. Hence, they did not bind the Secretary legally.

    Second, the political aspect:

    Capital punishment in this country is tolerated as a deterrent because the man in the

    street believes that the law is administered without fear or favour. If Amery were

    reprieved it would be difficult to convince the ordinary man that Amery had not

    received exceptional and privileged treatment.385

  • 194

    That settled it. The Home Secretary declined a reprieve, and John Amery was

    executed on 19 December 1945 at Wandsworth by Albert Pierrepoint.

    Forensic pathologist Dr. Keith Simpson performed the autopsy on the same

    day, as usual. John Amery had suffered fracture dislocation between the 2nd

    and 3rd cervical vertebrae; the cord was completely separated with a 2-inch

    gap. Hyoid and thyroid cartilages showed multiple fractures.386 Pierrepoint

    could be well pleased with his craftsmanship.

  • 252

    317 Ipson, Erik, article »‚Kiss and Tell‘ Officer Draws Heaps of Scorn«, New York Times, 05/10/1994 318 Hayward, Snow, p. 59, based on the diaries of Guy Liddell (head of counter-espionage, division B

    of MI5). 319 Snow, p. 122 320 Howard, Snow, p. 252 321 Treachery Act 1940, Section 1. Quoted from Clark, Capital Punishment, p. 201. 322 HC Deb 22 May 1940 vol 361 c218 323 www.josefjakobs.com and josefjakobs.blogspot.ca 324 Hayward, p. 203. »…the outcome edged uncomfortably close to state murder.« (Hayward, p. 252) 325 TNA PRO KV 2/30 and KV 2/31. 326 Fielding, Family, p. 170 327 Pierrepoint, Autobiography, p. 140f 328 Fielding, Bible, p. 207f 329 Jackson, Coroner, p. 302 330 McLaughlin, Execution Suite, p. 87 331 Fielding, Bible, p. 181 332 Autobiography, p. 192 333 Jackson, Coroner, p. 303. Cf. also Jackson, Camps, p. 239 334 LPC4 form, execution Udham Singh, 31/07/1940. 335 Fielding, Bible, p. 182; Fielding, Pentonville, p. xiv; LPC4 entries of José Waldberg and Carl Heinrich

    Meier (10/12/1940). 336 Pierrepoint, Autobiography, p. 144 337 McLaughlin, Harry Allen, p. 22. The documents in the British National Archive covering this murder

    case bear the signature WO 208/4633. 338 Salt Lake Tribune of 03/07/1945, p. 3, article »British Try Nazis In Comrade Death« 339 de Normann, p. 118 340 de Normann, p. 117 341 According to Rasch, NDB article »Rosterg, August« 342 de Normann, p. 117 343 SPIEGEL 45/1968 of 04/11/1968, p. 73 344 03/07/1945, p. 3, article »British Try Nazis In Comrade Death« 345 Scotland, Cage, p. 60f 346 Account follows de Normann, chapter 7 and 8. 347 De Normann, p. 122 348 Faksimile of this diary page see Fielding, Pentonville, p. 105 349 Location of grave: Section 3, row 16, grave 491. The documents covering this murder case are in

    the British National Archive, signature WO 208/4634. 350 Information by Volksbund; e-mail to me dated 14/08/2015 351 Dachs, p. 136 352 I.e. the day before the executions: 12 December 1945. 353 Pierrepoint, Autobiography, p. 146. Italics mine. 354 B. Gelderblom runs three web sites concerning Hameln local history: www.gelderblom-hameln.de,

    www.juedische-geschichte-hameln.de and www.geschichte-hameln.de. I thank him for his

    permission to print his photos. 355 Pierrepoint, Autobiography, p. 150

  • 253

    356 Op. cit., p. 149, italics mine. 357 Op. cit., p. 150 358 »equivalent rank of Lt.-Col.«, WO 32/20624 No. 1A, »Instructions regarding the executioner« 359 Fielding, Family, p. 298-300; Klein, p. 78; TNA PRO FO 1060/243 No. 27 360 See www.bergenbelsen.co.uk; in the documents section the Death Warrant returns (with times) can

    be found. 361 See the files in TNA PRO HO 45/25454, released in March 2000 362 Fielding, Family, p. 199-218 when mentioning each execution 363 Plot »E«, Oise-Aisne American Cemetery and Memorial, near Fère-en-Tardenois (Picardie, France) 364 Krone, »Hingerichtetengräber« 365 Original death warrants in TNA PRO FO 1020/2066 366 Pierrepoint, Autobiography, p. 160 367 Pierrepoint, Autobiography, p. 161 368 TNA PRO PCOM 9/633. Quoted as well in Klein, p. 82 369 Seyrl/Schalk, Josef Lang, p. 235f 370 For example Advocate (Burnie, Tasmania) of 07/10/1946, p. 5, quoting the Sunday Times 371 War Department Pamphlet No. 27-4, Procedure for Military Executions, dated 12/06/1944 372 Thus Dachs, p. 120 373 Time Magazine of 28/10/1946, article »WAR CRIMES: Night Without Dawn« 374 French MacLean, The Fifth Field 375 p. 120 376 MacLean, p. 79 377 MacLean, p. 286 378 I used http://www.stephen-stratford.co.uk/william_joyce.htm for this account. 379 Barry, Treason, p. 303 380 Barry, Treason, p. 295 381 Klein, p. 93 382 Treason, p. 129f. 383 Mental Deficiency Act 1913, Part I, 1.d). 384 TNA PRO HO 144/22823, quoted from http://www.stephen-stratford.co.uk/amery_report.htm 385 Quoted from Klein, p. 95f 386 LPC4 form (Collection Spicer)

    Authorised translation from

    Traugott Vitz, Langes Seil, schneller Tod. Wie Großbritannien seine Mörder

    hängte, Arnstadt 2016 (ISBN 978-3-934277-66-3)

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